Good Design Takes Time. Not Because It’s Precious. Because It’s Collaborative.

There’s a persistent misconception that when designers talk about time, it’s about ego or perfectionism. That good design needs endless weeks because it’s lofty or precious. That’s not what I’ve seen at all. Good design takes time because it’s a collaborative, iterative process.

When I ran my studio, I consistently won people over by walking them through how we actually worked. Step by step. No big reveals. No disappearing acts. We started with mood boards and refined them through multiple rounds. Then we moved into concepts and refined those. And so on. Clients responded really well to this because it gave them real input and real control over the outcome. That’s a good thing. Design should not feel like a black box. We aimed for weekly or biweekly check-ins on every project. We never vanished for a month and came back with a fully baked solution. Work was shared early and often, so clients could react, think, and help shape it as it evolved. Here’s where things often got contradictory.

Many potential clients wanted deep collaboration, lots of touchpoints, and meaningful input. But they also wanted everything done yesterday. Those two things cannot coexist. A realistic timeline looks something like this. A few days to design a concept. A day to present and discuss it. Several days for the client to sit with it, gather internal feedback, and align stakeholders. Then feedback comes back, and another few days are needed to refine and strengthen the work. What always stood out to me was how often clients assumed their feedback wouldn’t take long. They’d ask design teams to compress their timelines to a couple of days, while also needing a full week themselves to review internally. That imbalance is where projects start to break down. If you want true collaboration, you have to allow time on both sides.

What many clients never see is that before anything is shared, the work has already gone through multiple rounds internally. Concepts are questioned, refined, challenged, and improved. That process is what raises the quality. You can absolutely pay someone junior to produce something in a day and put it straight in front of stakeholders. But it won’t land the same, because fewer perspectives make for weaker outcomes. I’ve also seen agencies try to speed things up by limiting stakeholders and cutting teams out of the process. It might feel efficient in the moment, but it almost always backfires. Those teams resurface later, frustrated that they weren’t involved, with feedback that could have meaningfully shaped the work earlier. Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It has to work across an organization, not just for the loudest or most senior voices in the room.

Good design isn’t slow for the sake of being slow. It’s deliberate. It makes room for thinking, collaboration, and iteration. When you rush that process, you don’t save time. You just move the friction to later, when it’s more expensive and harder to fix.